Today’s global food supply chains are more complex than they’ve ever been. Until recently, consumers ate the food they grew in their communities and would adjust their diet to suit the seasonal availability of various products like fruits and vegetables. Today, consumers can have food from any part of the world as part of their regular diet. In the United States alone, food travels on average 1,300 miles from farm to fork, with 33% of products and 80% of seafood imported from other countries. The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates food products that are processed by more than 300,000 different facilities in over 150 different countries.
In such a complex supply chain, food travels around the world in the custody of multiple agents, with variations in documentation and processing resulting in loss of critical information about food origins and authenticity. In many cases, the food itself goes missing. Approximately 1.3 billion tonnes of food is lost from the global food supply chain annually without any understanding of where it goes.
In addition to lost food and inconsistent documentation, the complexity of the food supply chain means that it is vulnerable to both accidental and intentional events that impact food safety and quality. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 48 million Americans get sick from foodborne illness each year, with approximately 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths. The steady annual increase of this number is at least partially attributable to the complexities of the global food supply chain.
The complexity of the global supply chain, the strict regulations of food safety, and the consequences of supplier noncompliance mean that your relationships with your suppliers and your ability to manage and act on supplier data have become increasingly important. Having a robust supplier management program is critical to managing risk across the supply chain to prevent public health emergencies, supply shortages, or work stoppages.
In the Intelex webinar Driving Consistency and Taming Chaos with Hello Fresh and Intelex, Tim DeWolfe, Associate Director, Quality Systems for Hello Fresh, Jeremy Mawson, Food Safety Specialist at Intelex, and Mark Archibald, Senior Account Executive at Intelex, will discuss the best practices for document control, streamlining continuous improvement processes, quality management around food safety, and the impact of Intelex in helping organizations manage supplier risk and compliance. Attendees will learn about the following:
• How the integration of information systems throughout the supply chain can be standardized to achieve end-to-end tracking.
• How to maintain data to be in compliance and reduce the risk of violations.
• The importance of anticipating and preventing food integrity events instead of simply responding to them.
